Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch has conducted a robust defence of his firm's agreement to acquire Interwoven in an exclusive interview with CIO UK.Speaking on the same day that Autonomy announced the US$775 million deal, Lynch said the move should be seen as more of an extension of the firm's shift towards serving the governance, risk and compliance market rather than an embrace of traditional enterprise content management (ECM).

At this time of year, journalists love to compose lists to fill demand for content that can be rolled out at some point in the media dog days over the festive period, even if the writers themselves have disappeared off on holiday. Nothing wrong with that, so here is ours, but in the form of an antidote, suggesting some things that won't happen next year.5. Broad deployment of business intelligence tools. Lots of people think that BI tools will be deployed on more desktops so end-users can better understand trends -- and, naturally, BI vendors are keen to expand from their executive customer base. But BI is advanced software for advanced people and giving full-scale analysis tools to the troops is a bit like providing a Howitzer to get rid of a mouse -- silly and really quite dangerous too. Making the tools cheap and more usable is just marketing department window dressing.

<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/technology/personaltech/04pogue-email.html?_r=1&amp;adxnnl=1&amp;partner=permalink&amp;exprod=permalink&amp;pagewanted=all&amp;adxnnlx=1228474938-xR9a71COhmTik5MbgO1vYw">David Pogue has an interesting piece in The New York Times</a> about readers' reactions to his negative review of RIM's BlackBerry Storm. Pogue gave the smartphone a drubbing and copped the righteous flak of CrackBerry addicts everywhere as a result.

The weather might be arctic and the recession biting but Salesforce.com has a warm glow about it after the <a href="http://investor.salesforce.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=141811&amp;p=irol-newsArticle&amp;t=Regular&amp;id=1228924&amp;">software-as-a-service pioneer said revenues were up 43 per cent</a> year on year for its third quarter.

The banking collapse has seen Karl Marx's stock rise higher than at any point since the 1960s and the old stogie-fancier was on the button again when he wrote that "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce".

<a href="http://www.citrix.com/lang/English/aboutCitrix.asp">Citrix Systems</a> might not be the first company that comes to mind when CIOs think about the most influential business IT vendors of the last 20 years, but even if it doesn't quite stand alongside Microsoft, it has a solid claim to fame as the firm that reinvented the possibilities of Windows computing.

Being an IT leader is tough enough at the best of times, but what do you do when your company is stacked with IT experts? 'Make the most of it' would appear to be the attitude of Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture, one of the world's biggest management consulting, technology services and outsourcing companies.&quot;It's interesting: There are 180,000 experts on my job here,&quot; he quips, referring to the total size of Accenture's workforce. He also has 3500 staff working for him. &quot;That leads to feedback and scrutiny, and that's good. The educated consumer puts you in good stead. They challenge you as long as you're willing to try things. I get to leverage this capability.&quot;

For the best part of the last 20 years, pundits have reported on challengers to Microsoft Office and Exchange, the hugely powerful and lucrative franchises that sit alongside Windows in the underpinnings of the world's biggest software company. Most have failed to survive, never mind prosper, but the latest web-based challenger from Google seems to have some legs.

E-discovery is a relatively new concept that describes the process by which information is recovered from corporate networks, usually to answer the demands of regulators or the law. It is a subject close to the hearts of CEOs everywhere, given the stringent penalties and resulting brand damage that have been applied to companies unable to provide information on demand.

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